Shades of Doom v4.1 (07-09-23)

[Spaceman333]

Thanks, this helps. : )

[Gez]

Judgement Zombie seems to be based off sprites from Strife (which in turn where based on Doom sprites...) and perhaps a bit of the Doom 64 player helmet?
Black Widow is based off the Aracknight, so it should also credit Amuscaria.
Lord of Heresy sprite set was originally a baron reskin by Vader for The Rebirth, so Vader should be credited.
Plasma Afrit is based off Afrit, so it should credit Kristus' sprite edit.
Speaking of, Afrit is credited to "Ebola" but he's been using the name Kristus at least since December 2005. (Likewise for the Phantom.)
Primal Archvile's headmask is based off the centaur/slaughtaur shield in Hexen, so it should credit Raven Software too.
For the cyclops demon, credits should go to a lot of people for the edits: viewtopic.php?p=882261#p882261
Long story short, Amuscaria made a red demon edit with pain elemental horns, then IMX made an eyeless edit of it, then I added a caco eye to it. It looks like the complex doom variant was recolored to dark pink instead of saturated red. Feel free to add the red and tan versions if you want.

Why not the Avactor's Lost Soul? I can get that its Pain Elemental and Cacodemon, being mere recolors, are not necessarily very interesting, but a "Primal Lost Soul" would work since it had a nice sprite edit.

[Cyanide]

Really helpful stuff

Thanks! I'll change / add credits as needed.

Why not the Avactor's Lost Soul? I can get that its Pain Elemental and Cacodemon, being mere recolors, are not necessarily very interesting, but a "Primal Lost Soul" would work since it had a nice sprite edit.

Last I checked, the Pain Elemental looked different than it does now. I'll see if I can get permission to use some more sprites from Avactor. Thanks for the suggestion!

[Syrion]

Hey, I'm not much into Doom modding, my main Doom "consumption" is by way of Final Doomer or just the classic game in GZDoom. As such I haven't grown tired of the classic monster behaviours, yet, and was really looking forward to using some kind of themed monster reskin pack to use with FD. From what I've seen SoD definitely comes the closest to that with what's available right now, and it's already a lot of fun, so good job on that!
I was about to suggest a menu for themed preset selections, but as I've seen it has already been suggested recently, I just thought I'd chime in and say that would be a really cool addition to an already fine mod If possible, it would also be pretty fun to be able to create custom presets, which would also require less pre-defined presets on your end.

[edit]
Despite naive suggestions, I also have a tremendous bug to report! In the roster menu, the Spider Mastermind variant "Conqueror" is mistakenly also titled "Director" when viewed. That is all

[Cyanide]

Hey, I'm not much into Doom modding, my main Doom "consumption" is by way of Final Doomer or just the classic game in GZDoom. As such I haven't grown tired of the classic monster behaviours, yet, and was really looking forward to using some kind of themed monster reskin pack to use with FD. From what I've seen SoD definitely comes the closest to that with what's available right now, and it's already a lot of fun, so good job on that!
I was about to suggest a menu for themed preset selections, but as I've seen it has already been suggested recently, I just thought I'd chime in and say that would be a really cool addition to an already fine mod If possible, it would also be pretty fun to be able to create custom presets, which would also require less pre-defined presets on your end.

[edit]
Despite naive suggestions, I also have a tremendous bug to report! In the roster menu, the Spider Mastermind variant "Conqueror" is mistakenly also titled "Director" when viewed. That is all

Thanks for the kind words! It helps more than you might imagine.
I'm looking into doing some more customization for the roster. No promises, other than I'll give it my best.

The Roster has been fixed for the next release. Thanks!

A small update:
I'm currently changing the offsets of every sprite in the mod. I'm doing it manually, 1 sprite at a time, so it is very time consuming. Once I'm done, animations should look way better, and hitboxes should be more precise. Also, I've finally found the time to do more Doom-stuff, after a stretch of pretty rough personal stuff.

At the time, the new changelog contains ~15 additions to the roster. So not the largest expansion, but hey... tall oaks from little acorns grow.

[Whopper Mac]

Howdy there, literally made an account here to thank you for making this! I thought that might have seemed a bit excessive but then I realized that I must have sunk days worth of hours into modded Doom thanks to this mod alone. Fighting some of those black/white boss monsters on slaughtermaps with some OP weapons from other mods is genuinely one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had.

Anyway, I realize my greatest fear at this point, more then death itself, is the idea of you NOT making more stuff. I mean, no pressure. Just want you to know that you're appreciated! And I'm lookin forward to seeing new features of course, that preset selector things sounds cool if it's doable.

[HopelessPlace]

Hi, I use Zdoom and I wanna use your mod, but I don't find SoD.pk3 to respect the load order... Can you help me?

[Cyanide]

Hi, I use Zdoom and I wanna use your mod, but I don't find SoD.pk3 to respect the load order... Can you help me?

Shades of Doom won't work with ZDoom. You need to run it with GZDoom to make it work.

[HopelessPlace]

GZDoom is too high, to Vista... Where I can find a randomizer monster for Zdoom ? Thanks to the reply.

[Cyanide]

Where I can find a randomizer monster for Zdoom ?

I think if you search on the forums long enough you might find an older mod that's compatible with ZDoom. But I wouldn't get my hopes up.

You might have luck with other source ports like Zandronum, but I don't know if that runs on Vista. I only use GZDoom.

[Cyanide]

Progress report:
As I've mentioned before, I've been fixing the sprites offsets of all monstersprites in Shades. I've just completed all the zombie variants. These take up roughly 1/4 of the roster, so theres still a while before I'm done.

I've added 51 monsters to the roster. This brings the total number of unique monsters to 395. It's gotten to the point where I'm running out of stuff to add. I'm also struggling to find propper credits for some of them. I'll make a seperate post down the line with images of the ones I'm trying to credit. I'll have to get permission from each of the sprite creators before actually using them.

When I'm done with v4 I'm going to take a break from Shades. I've promised myself to not play Doom before releasing this version, so I've got a serious backlog of stuff I want to play through. I'll probably stream some stuff down the line. Here's a link to my channel on Twitch.

As always: please post bug reports, roster additions and feature suggestions here.

V.4 is coming.

[Jezze]

V.4 is coming.

Yey!

One feature I would like to suggest is a settings for each monster variant, whether (or with what chance) it will be selected randomly.

I know that this has been requested many times before and that you don't know exactly how to implement it. Well here you go!

Random function.

---

Code: Select all

class CyanTools
{
    // Returns a random index within the range of probabilities, where the index of a higher probability is more likely to be returned.
    int GetRandomIndex(Array<double> probabilities)
    {
        // get random number between 0.01 (ignore probability of 0.0) and 1.00
        double r = double(Random(1, 100)) / 100.0;

        // sum probabilities
        double pSum = 0;
        int n = probabilities.size();
        for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
        {
            pSum = pSum + probabilities[i];
        }

        // extend random number up to sum of probabilities
        r = r * pSum;

        pSum = 0;
        for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
        {
            pSum = pSum + probabilities[i];
            if (r <= pSum)
            {
                // take first index where the random number is less than the current sum of probabilities
                return i;
            }
        }

        // should never be reached
        return 0;
    }
}

Usage.

---

Code: Select all

// TODO replace "Monster" by actual name
class MonsterRandomizer : EventHandler
{
    // TODO replace "Variances" entries by actual names
    static const string Variances[] = {
        "Monster 00 with 0.00",
        "Monster 01 with 0.25",
        "Monster 02 with 0.50",
        "Monster 03 with 0.75",
        "Monster 04 with 1.00",
        "Monster 05 with 0.00",
        "Monster 06 with 0.25",
        "Monster 07 with 0.50",
        "Monster 08 with 0.75",
        "Monster 09 with 1.00",
        "Monster 10 with 0.00",
        "Monster 11 with 0.25",
        "Monster 12 with 0.50",
        "Monster 13 with 0.75",
        "Monster 14 with 1.00"
    };
    
    // TODO read "Chances" entries from settings
    static const int Chances[] = {
        0,
        25,
        50,
        75,
        100,
        0,
        25,
        50,
        75,
        100,
        0,
        25,
        50,
        75,
        100
    };

    // TODO replace "Monster" by actual name
    static string GetMonsterToSpawn()
    {
        Array<double> chances;
        for (int i = 0; i < 15; i++)
        {
            chances.push(double(MonsterRandomizer.Chances[i]) / 100.0);
        }

        int r = CyanTools.GetRandomIndex(chances);
        return MonsterRandomizer.Variances[r];
    }
}

Result of 1500 test spawns.

---

Monster 00 with 0.00 = 0
Monster 01 with 0.25 = 41
Monster 02 with 0.50 = 128
Monster 03 with 0.75 = 148
Monster 04 with 1.00 = 171
Monster 05 with 0.00 = 0
Monster 06 with 0.25 = 39
Monster 07 with 0.50 = 105
Monster 08 with 0.75 = 146
Monster 09 with 1.00 = 172
Monster 10 with 0.00 = 0
Monster 11 with 0.25 = 59
Monster 12 with 0.50 = 98
Monster 13 with 0.75 = 173
Monster 14 with 1.00 = 220

with 0.00 = 0
with 0.25 = 139
with 0.50 = 331
with 0.75 = 467
with 1.00 = 563

[Cyanide]

Thanks Jezze!

Unfortunately, I don't understand zscript at all, so I won't add this to the next release. I'll certainly look into it though. Thanks a lot.

[Cyanide]

Small progress report:

I've startet streaming my work on Shades of Doom over on Twitch. Doing so helps me not procrastinate too much.
170 monsters need to have their sprites aligned properly, which means I've completed a bit over ½ the totalt roster. This is taking way more time than i originaly thought.
I've upped the amount of new monsters to ~70. For some reason it never occured to me to do the same amount of digging for sprites over on Doomworld as I've done here. Any other sources are welcome.

Anywho, I'm propably going to stream quite regularly for a while. I don't have a schedule, but on weekdays it's most likely between 16:00 and 23:00 UTC. Hope to see some of you all over there.

- Cyanide

[mrspeaker]

Suggestions:
As others have said, a sort of whitelist or blacklist system so we can choose what monsters can or cannot spawn. As for roster additions:
>Predator from "Aliens: The Ultimate Doom" would make a good revenant variant with his shoulder mounted plasma cannon. Especially since you already added the synth and the xeno from the same mod
>Warrior Bugs from "Starship Troopers" mod could make for pinky variants (if you reduce their size) or maybe a Baron/Knight that shoots green globs of acid(?) like they do in the mod itself.
>Ashes2063 monsters in general.
>One or two monsters from "Splatterhouse3d" would fit this mod although I don't remember their names now.
>Those green pinkies from Eviternity.